Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday May 15, 2011 @03:27AM
from the raise-eyebrows-not-aibos dept.

mikejuk writes "According to an announcement at a robotics conference this week, Aldebaran Robotics is planning to make a significant portion of its code open source. The NAOqi embedded software is cross-platform and forms a distributed robotics framework. The Nao robot has come from a small start to become one of the standard tools of educational and research robotics and it is also a lot of fun. At the moment a Nao is still a little too expensive to be used as a recreational platform, but who knows? Currently it is claimed that there are over 1500 Nao robots being used in education and research."

To misread this as "Alderaan Robotics" in the title and think they they were destroyed along with millions of other voices? Good thing they're open-sourcing their control code. Hate to see that get destroyed too.

“We will release our software as OPEN SOURCE to allow researchers, teachers, and developers to adapt and extend our software according to their needs and knowledge."

Basically, this means they will give you the source code so that you can make it better for them. They will not give you all the software needed to create your own robotics platform (only releasing portions of the code). The software is touted as being "cross platform", but rest assured that the copyright license restrictions will prevent you from making use of "their code" to power a robotics system not purchased from them.

I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League [www.tzi.de]. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites [bowdoin.edu] has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.

The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).

Maybe it will also help avoid the fate for an unemployed humanity Marshall Brain wrote about in the first part of "Manna" or I talk about in this youtube video: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com]

To avoid more economic disaster, we need to transition to a gift economy and other socioeconomic models before robots can replace most people in most tasks as they are more a